Rory hadn’t seen Mace, Sam and Akira since Ullapool. They’d parted just before the debriefing and just after Danni’s sudden and instantaneous disappearance apparently back into the time stream.
Now Rory sat with the team in their lounge, eating caramel popcorn whilst staring hypnotically at the big screen in their lounge. Mary’d asked Annie if she could arrange a sort of slideshow of female politicians and Government bureaucrats etc. that might be linked with P.I.S.C.E.S. in the hope that they might be able to identify their stylish antagonist, and then maybe they could discuss amongst ourselves the implications and what they should do about her… Despite Rory not seeing the woman, they valued his advice on how best to handle the situation if they managed to make a positive identification. After all she had to be fairly influential in order to ghost Tangleweb and Terra-Quake away to the Slaughterhouse.
It was not an easy task – especially since as far as the world was concerned, P.I.S.C.E.S. didn’t exist. Rory had been able to confirm the woman in white hadn’t been any of the females from St. Kilda. Her voice and clothing identified her as someone with money and likely upper class. As for staff members, there wasn’t a staff list Annie could access even by hacking the Government databases, unless she knew what she was looking for.
Annie had decided to start their search with powerful woman in politics. There were 200 female members of parliament including the current Prime Minister, Harriet Drummond, Annie being thorough as always. There was a further 185 female members in the House of Lords as well as 10% of all heads of Government departments. It was actually quite depressing that after 100 years of woman having the vote, women were still so badly represented in the top echelons of Government.
The show seemed endless and none of those shown seemed close enough in looks to be the deadly Woman in White. Unfortunately, Tinks had been lying low in the small of Sam’s back whilst the Gamemaster and his guests had been onscreen, so they only had the team’s descriptions to go on; not enough for an automated online facial search.
Then Rory spoke up, “Is there any chance the woman you seek,” referring to the woman in white, “is also linked to either MI5 or 6? Or could she have been infected with one of those parasites, like the chief scientist and the Director on St. Kilda? Just a thought.”
The comment from Akira about the designation ‘R’ did make Mary think of the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6 who typically signed letters with a “C” in green ink. This apparently originated from the initial used by Captain Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming, RN, when he signed a letter “C” in green ink. Since then their chief had been known as ‘C’. Could this ‘R’ be the same?
In addition P.I.S.C.E.S. were apparently tasked with paranormal investigations for the Government – the clue being in their name; the Paranormal Intelligence Section for Counterintelligence, Espionage, and Sabotage and who else other than the Library would likely have access to a rare grimoire such as the one being offered for their executions?
She mentioned the idea to Annie who immediately asked Frankie to begin a trawl of any apocryphal material available on both Security Departments that might relate to the formation of a paranormal section, the acquisition and storage of occult texts and crosslink it to any departmental head whose surname began with a “r”.
As they moved on from politicians to socialites, Jeeves wandered in, glancing at the screen, “Ah that is Lady Tabitha Holmwood, daughter of my old employer Phillip Holmwood – Lord Godalming. She was the reason for my being fired.” To Mary’s surprise this was a blonde, haughty-looking woman with a cruel mouth, not the woman she’d seen in Jeeves’ mind a year before that had so casually cursed him with the company of Ephialte demons.
The screen shifted to another young woman, “And that is Lady Jennifer Caedmon-Davis, she was a frequent guest of Lord Godalming’s, though Lady Tabitha avoided her. Don’t think I’ve ever seen both young ladies in the same room despite spending so much time under the same roof.”
Mary looked up and to her surprise realised that this Lady Jennifer was the one who’ she’d ‘seen’ cursing Jeeves, the one who’d subsequently changed into the half-Fae; someone that to Mary’s sidhe had to be a representative of the Court of the Unseelie Sidhe in the mortal world.
Mary sucked on her pipe a while, then scratched her tangled locks and glanced around the table. “That’s a lot of possibilities and dead-herrings to digest” she chuckled “But does anyone else thinking it’s a might suspicious that these two ladies were never seen together, given that at least one them could surely use a shape-changing glamour if she wished? Or maybe I’ve just read too many comics lately…””
Suddenly Frankie interrupted Jeeves’ with its search results, including a report it had found in the archives of the Scottish Government in Holyrood. It displayed a heavily redacted, typed report on the screen.
It was apparently a Top Secret report dated 1946 about the formation and subsequent closure of a section of MI-6 which had been based somewhere in Scotland in a location that was only referred to as “the Vault”.
According to this report, British intelligence first attempted to harness the occult to carry out espionage in the late nineteenth century with something called the Delphi Project, an experiment by the Admiralty using a variety of popular psychic and ritual methods like the Tarot and dowsing to fix the position of enemy vessels. The Delphi Project produced little success and was shut down by 1896, but it spurred the efforts of Lt. Commander Frederick Ramsey, who would go on to devote his life to the study of the supernatural. The young naval officer continued the psychical research of the Delphi Project on his own, but despite several efforts by Ramsey to get the project reinstated, the Royal Navy ignored his reports and Ramsey soon found his military career stalled. He resigned from the military in 1900.
The years between 1900 and 1916 were a long odyssey for Ramsey as he apparently exhausted his personal fortune in the search for individuals possessing psychic powers. For seven years, he travelled across the globe in this search before establishing the Ramsey Institute for Psychical Education in 1910 to test gifted individuals and teach them how to perfect their abilities. Nevertheless, Ramsey only encountered a small number of individuals with any appreciable psychic or metaphysical talent.
Ramsey returned to military service in 1916, at the bequest of Captain Mansfield Cumming, the chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI-6. Cumming had Ramsey create a department for psychic intelligence, the Special Reconnaissance Section or MI-13. Assembling a staff of alienists, psychologists, neurologists, and others well-versed in exotic disciplines like yoga and meditation, Ramsey used his pre-war research to have those “Talents” that exhibited psychic ability brought to England and use their powers to search for German U-Boats. These experiments soon broadened to include clairvoyance, precognition, psychometry, and telepathy, and by 1917, MI-13 had shown itself to be able to provide tangible if modest results. Nevertheless, due to the unconventional source of this intelligence, it was almost always ignored.
Cumming remained loyal to Ramsey and MI-13, and by the end of the First World War, the Special Reconnaissance Section grew to a staff of seventy researchers and twenty so-called Talents. Ramsey himself was promoted to the rank of Commander. MI-13 remained active through Cumming’s patronage, but with his subsequent retirement in 1923, the funding quickly drained away. Ramsey was forced to drop all of his Talents from the payroll, though MI-13 and their research apparently continued.
Something happened in the spring of 1925 that decimated the organisation, however that section of the document was heavily redacted.
In 1926 Ramsey made the acquaintance of Major David Cornwall who joined him in MI-13. Ramsey subsequently died in 1932. Again there were several paragraphs that were redacted.
Cornwall inherited all that remained of MI-13: which consisted then of two research assistants and five secretaries cramped into two small offices in a rundown civil-service building in Edinburgh. Even in such a reduced state, MI-13 was still considered for termination by the budget-conscious government. MI-13 was saved because, during their investigations, Ramsey and Cornwall had developed contacts in occult circles in Germany. Some of those contacts were Ariosophists, seekers of the lost mystical knowledge of the Aryan race, and had become involved in the burgeoning Nazi movement in Germany. Through these contacts, Cornwall was able to place agents close to the Ahnenerbe-SS, and gained enough intelligence on the Nazi Party to justify their existence.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, MI-6 “reapportioned” the agents MI-13 had been running in Germany. MI-13 was left in a precarious position, as it could no longer use the conventional intelligence gathered by those agents to keep from being closed down. Salvation came from one of Ramsey’s wartime Talents. On May 1, 1940, that person received a premonition of the fall of France and the Dunkirk evacuation, and contacted MI-13 to warn them. Cornwall sent these predictions in a sealed envelope to the office of Winston Churchill, to be opened on June 5th. When the envelope was opened and the contents read, Churchill immediately became a believer in the cause of MI-13.
On June 26, 1940, by order of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, MI-13 became an interagency task force liaising between MI-5, MI-6, and SOE tasked to exploit “unconventional intelligence-gathering techniques” against the Axis and to determine the extent and nature of the German paranormal intelligence program. Cornwall was promoted to Colonel and report directly to Churchill alone. This apparently continued until 1946 when the Department was considered surplus to requirements in the post-War economy and scheduled for closure. That was where the document ended.
Despite a thorough search, Frankie had failed to find any evidence that MI-13 actually closed, though it definitely ceased to exist under the MI-13 designation. Finally Frankie had found some records showing a series of government acquisitions going on well into the 60’s of a number of rare occult books being sent via Hollyrood again to this place known only as the Vault.
Could Ramsey have been the original “R”? Could P.I.S.C.E.S. have risen from the ashes of what had been MI-13? Whoever the woman in white was, she was clearly connected somehow to P.I.S.C.E.S., they just needed some means of identifying her.
Superhero Adventures, UK Style 